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Benjamin Melançon

Benjamin builds web sites to give people a little more power over their online presence. He strives to build ways to connect people for planning and coordination that will help us all gain a lot more power in the rest of our lives.

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Build a Drupal 7 site from planning through to giving people the privilege of posting pages and other content, with lots of key concepts covered and tips given along the way. Building this site is continued in Chapters 8 and 33.

Chapters 18, 19, and 20 form one unit, originally written as one chapter, covering everything you need to know to get started writing your own modules.

Drupal is a powerful and modular system— we've heard that before. Indeed, much of Drupal's power is in its modules, dynamos of pluggable functionality that can build on Drupal's base system and on one another to do wonderful things.

This chapter introduces two essential tools in the life of any Drupalista: Drush, the Drupal Shell which makes many tasks in Drupal much faster and easier; and Git, a distributed version control system which allows you to experiment freely with your code— and to collaborate with people around the world.

This chapter is about updating Drupal 7 core— note that means staying within Drupal 7. Appendix A covers upgrading a Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 if that’s what you need to do. There is a very large difference. A major version upgrade such as Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 will require updating all your modules to be compatible with the version you are upgrading to, your custom theme will need changes, and it will in general take a lot of work to get a complex site working well again. You don't have to worry about any of that here.

Credits not in the chapter:

Upgrade Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 by encapsulating all essential steps in code, so that the live content is preserved. Take a look at data migration, an alternative approach to upgrading that also works when moving from a non-Drupal site.